1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a dialog supporting device which supports an on-going dialog made between people.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, translation devices have been developed with the purpose of supporting on-going dialog in different languages, which is made between ordinary people and local people on trips abroad or the like. Such a translation device is represented by certain translation devices, by which a translation scheme using original/translation pairs of example sentences or example usages is implemented in small information processing apparatuses such as Personal Digital Assistances (PDAs). Such devices have thousands of examples in order to cover general travel conversation. However, the devices have a problem in usability when a user actually uses the device, since the user has to select a desired example from a list of the examples by sight. This problem is noticeable, especially when such a device has a small display for displaying the list of examples, which makes it difficult for the user to view many examples at once. Moreover, in general use of the translation device, one dialog with a dialog partner requires more than several examples, so that the translation device completes the dialog taking much more time than the user expects. Therefore, in order to achieve the final purpose of supporting dialog between people, there is a need for a function by which the user can speedily select the desired example from a great number of examples.
As a method for solving the above problem, there has been proposed a technique of narrowing down candidates for a next utterance of a user, using example dialog models or a corpus of conversation training histories, as disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2003-30187, for instance.